The teacher-student encounter runs parallel to an inner tension between the states of being a knowledgeable adult and an unknowing child.

In every adult there is a child who constantly leads us on to new things.

The adult's knowledge makes him rigid and inaccessible to innovation.

The unknowing child's irrational experimentation, his naive openness, must be retained as a living potential in every adult if he is to remain emotionally alive.

Thus the adult is never completely grown up; if he is to be somewhat healthy psychically, he must always keep a certain childlike unknowingness.

One often meets teachers who seem to have lost every trace of childishness, who have even fewer childish traits then the average healthy adult. Such teachers have become "only-teachers," who confront unknowing children almost as their enemy. They complain that children know nothing and do not wish to learn; their nerves are torn by their students' childishness and lack of self-control.

For this kind of teacher children are the Other, that which he himself wishes never to be.

A dynamic teacher must have a certain childishness in himself, just as a doctor must have a vital

relationship to the pole of illness.

He must not only transmit knowledge but also awaken a thirst for knowledge in the children, but this he can only do so if the knowledge-hungry, spontaneous child is still alive within him.

When [the teacher's childishness is repressed and projected onto the pupils] learning progress is blocked. The children remain children and the knowing adult is no longer constellated in them ... Children are his enemies, representing the internally split pole of the archetype, whose reunification is attempted through power.

[One way] that we become mindless is by forming a mindset when we first encounter something and then clinging to it when we reencounter that same thing. Because such mindsets form before we do much reflection, we call them premature cognitive commitments.

When we accept an impression or a piece of information at face value, with no reason to think critically about it, perhaps because it seems irrelevant, that impression settles unobtrusively into our minds until a similar signal from the outside world calls it up again. At that next time it may no longer be irrelevant, but most of us don't reconsider what we mindlessly accepted earlier.

The mindless individual is committed to one predetermined use of the information, and other possible uses or applications are not explored.

When our minds are set on one thing or on one way of doing things, mindlessly determined in the past, we blot out intuition and miss much of the present world around us.

Learning what to ignore is critical for effective psychological
functioning—it would be simply overwhelming to process the full stream
of information available to our senses as we make our way through the
world.

So we cull through this information for relevant details,
screening out everything else. The problem is, the screened-out
information might be useful later, but by then we are slow to realize
its significance, to unlearn its irrelevance.

This process can
be modeled in the laboratory by preexposing participants to seemingly
unimportant stimuli that later form the basis of a learning task. For
the average person, this preexposure stifles subsequent learning—the
critical stimulus has been rendered “irrelevant” and fails to penetrate
awareness. Not so, however, for those high in openness, who are less
susceptible to latent inhibition.

This again demonstrates a more
inclusive mode of thinking—a “leaky” cognitive system, if you will—that
lets in information that others filter out [...] Open people see more possibilities in even the most mundane of objects.

According to personality theorists, openness reflects a greater “breadth, depth, and permeability of consciousness” and propensity to “cognitively explore” both abstract information (ideas and arguments) and sensory information (sights and sounds).

Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones.

Categorizing and recategorizing, labeling and relabeling as one masters the world are processes natural to children. They are adaptive and inevitable part of surviving in this world. Freud recognized the importance of creation and mastery in childhood:

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early in childhood? The child's best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of the world in a new way which pleases him?

The child's serious re-creation can become the adult's playful recreation.

As adults, however, we become reluctant to create new categories [...] our outcome orientation tends to deaden a playful approach.

In most educational settings, the "facts" of the world are presented as unconditional truths, when they might better be seen as probability statements that are true in some contexts but not in others.

Children are usually taught "this is a pen," "this is a rose," "this is a car." It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category "pen."

But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that "this could be a pen"? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child "this is a pen."

What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: "This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass"? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child taught initially taught "a family is a mother, a father, and a child" versus "a family could be ...."

Some may argue that to teach children about the world unconditionally is to make them insecure. Will children taught "it depends" grow up to be insecure adults? Or will they be more confident in a world of change than those of us brought up with absolutes?

Even in the most minor and ordinary details of our lives, we are locked in by the unconditional way we learn in childhood. We pick up rules before we have a chance to question them.

- healthiest form with most possibilities for adjustment
- history and capacities conductive to movement
- Open state thinking changes as conditions/realities change
- deals effectively with barriers
- doesn't present as sharp a picture of the level as Closed does

ARRESTED: caught by barriers in self/situation

- possibility for change only if barriers are overcome
- may lack insights that explain what is happening
- will require more dissonance be created to spark change
- makes excuses and rationalizes the status quo

CLOSED: blocked by biopsychosocial capacities

- may lack neurological equipment or necessary intelligences
- historic traumas may have triggered closure
- unable to recognize barriers, much less overcome them
- threatened by change and fights to stay put or else

By 'insight' we mean there is an understanding of (1) what
went wrong with the previous system and why, as well as (2) what
resources are now available for handling the problems better. Until
people have a rationale for understanding why the prior system was
embraced initially and why it was eventually undermined, lasting change
into the next order is fitful. Insight keeps the old problems in focus
and clarifies the new ones.

Different patterns and
models, as well as step-by-step processes for implementing them, are
essential to moving into a new system. These alternative scenarios must
be active in the collective consciousness before they can be considered.
Too often they are guarded in the minds of an elite few 'planners' or
'decision makers.'

People need mental pictures of
what things might be like for them in their own real Life Conditions,
not for some distant Hollywood stars or textbook case studies.
[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]Spiral Dynamics, p. 84

Hegel deals with a sequence of logical categories: being, becoming,
one, many, essence, existence, cause, effect, universal, mechanism,
and "life". Each is examined in turn and made to reveal
its own inadequacies and internal tensions. Each category is made
to generate another more promising one which in its turn will
be subject to the same kind of scrutiny.

Hegel calls this dynamic aspect of his thinking the power of "negation".

It is by means of this "negativity" of thought that
the static (or habitual) becomes discarded or dissolved, made
fluid and adaptable, and recovers its eagerness to push on towards
"the whole."

Dialectical thinking derives its dynamic of negation from its
ability to reveal "contradictions" within almost any
category or identity.

In Rogers’ view, a therapy based on the notion of preserving the client’s personal self is misguided. So is a therapy based on the notion of preserving the counselor’s personal self.

It would be better to focus on the moment of experience which we share with our client, finding in it the invitation to be new rather than to go on repeating our past moments of experience the way a rock does.

[…] it is the openness of awareness to what exists in the present moment that is a key condition for the emergence of creativity.

For counselors following Rogers’ or Whitehead’s thinking each new moment is a moment of creation in which we and our client may either allow ourselves to be drawn towards the goal of beauty and complexity and become more than what we have been, or we allow ourselves to be trapped by past habits and reactions into repeating ourselves once more.